Rhododendrons and Silence: A Search for Meaning Among Coastal Redwoods

Monasticism implies solitude. Not isolation, but time apart for searching the soul and pointing it toward a religious end. For those who are not even vaguely religious, monasticism still can be a symbol of the examined life. For a visitor to a place like Redwoods Monastery in far Northern California, the challenge is to go home and think again about life’s meanings.

In that context, monasticism can have influence in worlds far removed from the rhododendron and wild irises that spring up around Redwoods Monastery, far from the deer that graze at dusk and the winds that blow through the majestic redwoods that surround this spot of solitude.

That is not a journalistic beginning. The journalist would write: “Ten women who belong to the Cistercian order of the Roman Catholic Church meditate, pray, study and record their dreams in journals to know themselves--and ultimately their God--better while living in an isolated valley 22 miles outside Garberville. They earn what money they need--and their lives are simple--by baking altar bread. They accept guests on retreats. They also try to protect a grove near the Sinkyone Wilderness from logging, help Navajo women working to save their homes and contribute to Amnesty International.”

But ordinary journalism doesn’t tell the whole story. A visit here has more to do with rhododendron and times of silence than with the hard facts of how the women make their bread. It takes those silences to help adjust from the pressures of the outside world. Early each day there is meditation, for the monastery women and guests alike, in the stunningly simple, almost Oriental chapel. Then there is worship and breakfast, taken in silence. Work begins soon after 9.

Mother Myriam Dardene, 66, the abbess at Redwoods and one of its founders, is uncomfortable with questions of what makes this monastery unique. It is remote, but so are other monasteries. It is a community of women, but there are three other Cistercian women’s monasteries in the United States--in Massachusetts, Arizona and Iowa. Its members wear ordinary street clothes, but that’s hardly news. They concentrate on study of the Scriptures as do other monastics. Their abbess believes that a “good ritual, good liturgy, is good medicine,” that “it helps people bring their questions, problems, small and greater crises, to the word of God, to a religious . . . sounding board.”

The remoteness attracts people on retreats seeking time to pray or work through transitions in their lives. But there is a twist on self-examination that may not occur at typical monasteries, places where men intone Gregorian chants and work in the fields. These women use some of the modern psychoanalytic tools toward spiritual ends.

“That’s true, yes,” said Myriam (all the women go by first names). It was this interest in self-knowledge, a term she prefers to self-analysis or psychoanalysis, that pulled a journalistic visitor briefly into the cloistered world.

Self-knowledge “is a traditional path in any type of monasticism,” Myriam reminded her visitor. Depth psychology--exploring the unconscious--helps in enlarging this knowledge of the self. Only through understanding themselves better do the women feel they can understand their religious role more fully.

Myriam, a short woman with salt-and-pepper hair, speaks in a melodic Belgian accent, weighing her words. She is precise, philosophical, yet properly wary of the jargon one lapses into when talking about the soul and the unconscious.

She refuses to be pigeonholed in a particular school of psychology. It is clear, though, that she has been influenced by the work of Carl Gustav Jung and by the San Francisco’s Guild for Psychological Studies, which examines the links between the teachings of Jesus and the way people make value decisions. The women at Redwoods seek to be in touch with their unconscious, otherwise, Myriam said, “there is a big chance that it will get us by the neck during the day” in the form of some inexplicable behavior.

“I think it’s important to the future of monasticism to include in the totality of the person both the conscious ‘I’ and the unconscious in the process of self-discovery.” It is important, she thinks, because this merging of the conscious and the unconscious provides a more encompassing way to know the human soul and the sacredness of God, part of the fundamental search of people in monastic life.

Myriam, whose conversation is rich in allusions to literary figures such as Christopher Fry or Gabriel Marcel, most often quotes the Bible. She recalls Jesus telling his disciples that nothing which goes into a man defiles him, only that which proceeds out of him. People must not repress their unconscious but rather attempt to understand what it is saying to them. “If we do not change ourselves as individuals,” she says, “who will change the world?”

This journey into self is central in being “a whole person instead of being a perfect person.” People have “put authority so much on the church,” but are very afraid to use their own responsibility. To Myriam, “one way of discovering one’s own inner authority is to explore the life and teachings of the historic Jesus.”

But isn’t that a controversial position in the Catholic Church? Self-knowledge empowers the individual; the Catholic Church has long sought to empower the institution. How is the Vatican disposed toward the approach of the sisters?

Myriam laughs softly, answering only, “It’s a grace to live in the woods.”

By living in the woods as monastics, the women make it clear that they have in no sense renounced life. Instead, they feel they have gained a chance to know life.

Does it make a difference in their monasticism that this is a community of women? In Myriam’s eyes, monasticism can be demanding but not necessarily rigid and patriarchal. Monasticism needs focus, structure, but also requires humility and an understanding of relationships. There is “attention to the inner world,” but attention also to the social situation. “To give attention, to listen, to receive instead of dominating, imposing,” are feminine qualities--”in men and women, I would appreciate your saying.”

Myriam was among the first group of women to settle at Redwoods. A college-level teacher before she took her vows at 34, she originally intended to go to the Congo but explained, in characteristically understated fashion, that the political situation there “had deteriorated pretty rapidly” in the early 1960s. Instead, she and three other Belgian women started the California monastery in October, 1962, on land partly donated, partly sold by a convert to Catholicism.

What does this matter to someone in Los Angeles--that 10 women live in the woods and meditate?

A monastery, Myriam said, is an environment in which one seeks and finds God, where one learns religious meaning, where one explores “the mysterious reality that something in the universe may have a purpose, a will, an intention.”

And monasteries can have value even for those not overtly religious. They can be models for people who might otherwise “never identify their hunger for depth, for beauty, for focus, if they do not see it in some form,” she said.

“Modern physics tells us that an atom might influence another atom at a great distance,” Myriam said. “We know that the depletion of the Amazonian forest in the equatorial zone is affecting the oxygen on the planet. We know that toxic stuff hurts everybody. So at a certain subtle level, any attempt at creative living is like digging a furrow. Every loving action done anywhere is putting some oxygen, spiritual oxygen, in the universe.”

Important as it is, involvement with the concerns of the world “should not replace monastic living.” At best, “social concern in monasticism arises out of prayer and meditation so I would hate to see the contemplative focus of this place destroyed because of social involvement.”

California, Myriam readily acknowledges, creates a hospitable climate for Redwoods Monastery. “We would have never evolved into this simplified form of domestic monasticism if we had stayed in Europe or even if we had moved to the eastern United States.

“California still carries something of the last frontier. There is still a spirit in California, certainly in Northern California, if I speak for what I know best, where the American dream is still possible. But the American dream has almost to turn inwards to be able to create something imaginative.”